April 2002
My most vivid recollections
of SAFS in its early years relate to the successes of the chapter at Western
in campus politics. In September 1993, through accident or oversight, I
failed to receive notification of a chapter meeting, with the result that
I was not present when plans were made for the impending elections to the
University Senate. On the following morning a colleague telephoned to tell
me that, if I agreed, I was to be nominated as a SAFS candidate for Senate
in the Social Science constituency.
My first inclination was
to resist the idea on the ground that I would almost certainly be defeated,
not having a wide circle of friends and acquaintances outside my own Department.
My colleague argued, however, that I did have an unusually high level of
name recognition, thanks to my habit of expressing controversial opinions
in the letters column of the weekly Western News. Among other things, I
had been vehement in my condemnation of the University’s repressive Race
Relations Policy and the seemingly fanatical “political correctness” of
its Race Relations Officer – both of them posing threats to academic freedom
that SAFS’ influence later helped to eliminate, through the drastic revision
of the first and the resignation (under fire) of the second.
Eventually I permitted myself
to be persuaded, thinking that my candidacy would be an interesting experiment;
precisely because I could not rely on personal popularity, the election
would be more a referendum on my well-known political views than is usually
the case in Senate contests. The result was that I spent nearly four years
as a member of that body, from November 1993 until I took early retirement
from the University in 1997.
One thing led to another;
having won a Senate seat, I was asked in 1994 to run for the Faculty Association
executive. Again SAFS demonstrated its political effectiveness, for I was
elected along with two other SAFS nominees. For a time we held five of
the executive’s thirteen seats, as well as gaining a significant Senate
representation. In 1995, when I was up for re-election to Senate, SAFS
achieved what I remember as its greatest electoral victory. Out of nine
candidates who won seats against opposition in faculty constituencies,
no fewer than five ran with the local chapter’s endorsement, and all but
one of these were SAFS members. In a two-person race for a single seat,
our former and future national president Doreen Kimura carried the Biosciences
Division of Graduate Studies with more than 70 per cent of the vote. David
Munoz, former coordinator of the local chapter, headed the poll in the
Faculty of Medicine by a comfortable margin. Nowhere did a SAFS-supported
candidate suffer defeat.
The value of holding seats
in Senate was apparent in the spring of 1997, when the forces of “political
correctness” in the Department of Sociology tried to bring about adoption
of a departmental code of “ethics” severely restricting freedom of expression.
After Doreen Kimura and I drew attention to the issue on the Senate floor,
the senior administration gave assurances regarding the equal right to
academic freedom enjoyed by all members of faculty, regardless of departmental
affiliation. The forces of repression in Sociology failed to get their
way.
In later years the UWO chapter’s
political activity declined, but presumably it could be revived if a situation
arose that placed SAFS’ principles in renewed jeopardy. What was accomplished
earlier is evidence of what could be accomplished in future, and of what
perhaps could be accomplished in other universities, if the “politically
correct” were to offer sufficient provocation.
SAFS’ member Ken Hilborn
is Professor Emeritus in the History Department at UWO.
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